Outsourcing: the 3 ways we’re testing now

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So there was this point where outsourcing some basic tasks was not an option anymore.

Fulfilling the orders was the first one, and we are now also working with freelancers to manage our customer service, community management and copywriting.

Since we realised that we can’t do all of the tasks ourself anymore, we also had to learn about how and what to outsource efficiently to get the best outcome out of it.

#1 — Our own network

For the unqualified and simple tasks, we figured out that it was a good idea (so far) to start ASAP with people we knew in our own network who needed to make money and who were ready to spend a few hours each day from their laptop.

We’re using it for the order fulfilling and community management.

Regarding the customer service, the job is more qualified, but we also found someone who were used to work with Zendesk in our network, and she helped us to do the entire setup and now handle the entire customer service on a daily basis.

I’m not initially a big fan of mixing friends with business, but I think if the job which needs to get done is not super qualified and we need to get it done quickly, it’s worth it for short/middle term.

#2 — Upwork

We used Upwork to recruit our copywriter. She is working on the side for a major newspaper, and now she’s the one writing the blogposts we publish to give value to our customers and improve our SEO.

My goal is to keep working with her for anything related to written content (email marketing, product description, etc.), but we’ll go step by step on this and are now publishing her first articles.

Upwork is a great place to find any kind of freelancer, because there is many ways to secure the recruitment: ratings, reviews, % of successful work done, amount of hours worked on the platform, etc.

We will use it again whenever we need more skills.

#3 — Fiverr

The concept of Fiverr was initially to offer anything done for $5. Now it became a platform for freelancers to offer almost anything you can imagine, done FROM $5.

We used it to get some designs done, especially for our banners on the website or for our facebook ads.

The result we got was decent, but not SO great.

The platform makes it harder to find the perfect fit for what you need because most of the offer are pre-formatted, and it feels like a war game for the freelancers to be the one getting to do your order.

If I had to compare, Fiverr appeared to me like a cheap version of Upwork, which is more trustable in my opinion.

We are just starting to outsource some of the tasks which need to get done and took too much of our time, so we’re still learning by doing.

However, I realise that it’s really important to create processes and understand ourself the exact way to do things in order to outsource tasks such as Community Management, Order Fulfilling or Customer Service.

And by getting to outsource, it also helps to have a clearer vision of the business and how it’s working.

Because when someone is gonna do something that you did yourself manually and experimentally so far, you need to take some distance with the task and set some boundaries and efficient process so the outsourcing is efficient and not a total disaster.

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